With my first experience of attempting to read Patchwork Girl, I willingly gave up after 15 mins of trying to figure out how to read the story in order. It angered me because I thought I was accidently clicking the wrong links because they were going into random and confusing paths. So after Friday’s class I decided to have an open mind with the new expirence of accepting chaos.
I came up with a plan that helps me cope with my feeling of overwhelming disorder whenever I click on a random link. The plan is simple, I choose the “outline view” that makes me feel I have a clean and organizing view to help me choose the first major link. From that major link, I am lead to a small link. After reading the small link I click on the “links” tab to be led to the choice to further my learning’s with a new lexia. I know that I am learning from random links, but at the same time it makes me feel organized that I have an order to my madness.
This plan makes me feel like a detective because I only allow myself to view one window at a time, which blinds my vision of what the other main links are in the outline. Traveling to the next link is completely new to me, which forces me to keep traveling because I need to gather enough information for me to understand what is going on. Similar to how a dective has to find clues to solve his case, and as they find more clues they understand why something happened, who was involved, how it happened, where the scene was and what caused the case. Detectives are clueless to the case but as they gather information gradually, they piece the gathered information to conclude their case. With me, I journey chaotically from link to link, learning more about the story Patchwork Girl.
With this hypertext, it is hard for me to stay on track when I am trying to put my thoughts together with what I have just learned from my lexias because there is so much content. What Patchwork Girl lacks is technology for this technological time. Today, bookmarking links are limitless, but with Patchwork Girl book marking is limited. It doesn’t make sense to me, because the content and purpose for this new electronic technology is made to be continuous, while the technology aspect isn’t continuing to make new advances. I wonder why someone has not installed new technologies in PG?
Resulted from technology, the dotted line is significant in Patchwork Girl for its potential of forming a line. The dotted in PG line gives chance for change and freedom to imagine all day but, but a dotted line is also continuous and in pieces gives a path. This is significant because the technology in PG goes off to random lexias but still links together to create a story. With the girl monster, she is like a dotted line because she is not tightly sewn together, but she has potential to change into a being with great personality from her freedom to bounce from any topic of learning based on her new experiences.
As I have learned from Hayles, women authors are not respected like male authors at that time. Woman were thought to sew quilts not to write, which is perceived as feminism. Shelley who sewed her monster related her sewing to writing. “I had sewed her until black letters [she wrote] blurred stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt.” This shows that women are emotional, another form of feminism. Both quilting and emotion from creating her monster Shelley oddly, for that time, relates her feminism to writing, which is perceived only for men to succeed at.
Tags: Hayles, Patchwork Girl, Shelley Jackson
